Try as he might this late in the game, President Obama’s Israel policy should go down in history as a failure.
Although some of the worst accusations against him claim that the president’s failure is intentional, because he hates Israel itself, the weight of the evidence suggests a less sensational problem. In keeping with a broader pattern, the White House has expected Israel to accept its judgments on the largest matters, such as Iran, and then has become frustrated when Israel reacts poorly to its judgments on smaller ones, such as the status of settlements.
That is why the administration has gotten so little political mileage out of its fresh military aid package with Israel, offering nearly $40 billion over the next 10 years. Obama pledged it would make “a significant contribution to Israel’s security in what remains a dangerous neighborhood,” helping protect it “from all manner of threats.”
On that basis, the White House has guided its team to push hard for what the president has long believed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is too irresolute and weak to achieve: the ground-level preconditions for the so-called “two-state solution,” which would place a recognized territorial Palestinian regime side by side, “in peace,” with Israel. Obama seems to have reasoned that Israel is strong enough and safe enough to wipe out any excuse for slow-walking peace.
Here, the White House has only made matters worse for Israel, which is why Israel and its U.S. supporters have taken such offense to its Israel policy as a whole, and its last-minute push against settlements in particular. Even some of Obama’s defenders must admit that elevating settlements to a first-tier issue underscores the absurdity and futility of the president’s long-term approach.
Had Obama taken a more focused tack years ago, in concert with a far different approach to Iran and its proxies, the sentiments and stakes surrounding settlements would be considerably different. Had Obama accepted that the results of his Mideast policy have been controversial and mixed, at best, he could have adopted a posture toward Israel that could have succeeded.
He did not, and it has not, and no diplomatic spasm this month can change that.
